It was late by the time I finally got to Marlene’s place. It took me nearly two hours to drag my ass out of bed once Delilah left for work. And I’d made her late, too—but I couldn’t resist one more go around when I saw her in that little black skirt she was wearing. She was dressed so prim and proper, with her high-heeled pumps and her hair pinned up on top of her head. My hard-on was raging to bend the librarian over the bedframe. She left with her clothes slightly disheveled, her hair hanging loose and a just-fucked smile on her flush face. It was a good look for her. A really good look.

I’d be paying for a night of pretty strenuous cardio later. Midweek practices were always the hardest. It was going to be a killer after last night and barely any sleep. But I didn’t give a shit. I hadn’t felt this good in a damn long time. Four years, to be exact.

Grouper was cleaning the floor in the dining room when I passed by on the way to see Marlene. Without a ball to float his way, some improvisation was needed. The lunch service was done for the afternoon, but the staff was still putting away the leftovers, so I grabbed three small milks from a crate that one of Grouper’s maintenance guys was lifting and yelled, “Go long. Or you’re going to be cleaning up a puddle of cow piss.”

Grouper grumbled something but took off running toward the other end of the food hall. I sailed the first two mini milk cartons into his hands. Just as he was about to catch the third one, Shannon yelled to me and distracted Grouper. The third milk went through his open hands and hit him in the shoulder, right before falling to the ground and exploding all over the place.

“You can’t throw for shit.”

“Super Bowl MVP, old man. Super Bowl MVP.”

Shannon’s face warned me my afternoon was not going to be as uplifting as my morning.

“What’s up, Shannon?”

“She’s having a bad day, Brody.” Her voice cracked as she reached out and touched my forearm. The nurses at Marlene’s home were incredible. They’d seen so much heartbreak with these old people; it took a lot for them to get choked up.

“Physically or mentally?”

“Mentally. She remembers some things about Willow. Things she hasn’t remembered in a long time.”

Marlene was distraught and crying when I entered her room. I sat down on the side of her bed and took her hand. “What’s going on, Marlene?” I couldn’t judge what her memory was haunting her with, and I didn’t want to make it any worse than it needed to be.

“It’s Willow.”

Over the past four years I had learned to talk about Willow. It hadn’t been easy at first, but time had dulled the pain that hearing her name had made me feel in the beginning.

“What about Willow?”

“She called me last night. Said she was going to come see me next week for my birthday. Then the police came this morning.”

I looked to Shannon, who shook her head. “Someone did call her phone last night.” She lifted Marlene’s chart and flipped the pages. “The night nurse wrote it down. We suspect it was a telemarketer. Maybe the person happened to have had the name Willow?”

Marlene began to sob.

Shannon whispered, “She’s been doing that off and on for hours. Keeps rambling on about the police and a body in the river.”

Blocking Willow from my daily life was one thing, but the memories were still buried inside of me. Our memories. The good ones outnumbered the bad, even if the bad ones overshadowed the good.

“It’s okay, Marlene. It’s going to be okay.”

I was reassuring her the same way I had four years ago in the hospital waiting room. The same internal battle haunted me. Only now, Marlene’s dementia wasn’t early-onset. The days when she remembered the details of her granddaughter’s life were few and far between. There was less reason to tell her the whole truth now than there had been back then.

“Blue. She was so blue, Brody.”

The vision that had taken me almost a year to stop seeing every time I closed my eyes came barreling back. Willow being wheeled into the emergency room. By the time the river incident happened, she was already frail. My Willow was long gone, replaced by a three-bag-a-day heroin junkie who would disappear for weeks at a time. Her occasional visits were usually to steal what we were no longer willing to give her.

Marlene’s cry broke into a sob. I wrapped my arms around her. The night they pulled Willow from the East River wasn’t a night I ever wanted to reenact. Unfortunately, this was our second go around on the highlight reel of Marlene’s life. If only the memories people lost were just the bad ones.

“They don’t think she’s going to make it, Brody.”

“I know. It’s okay, Marlene. It’s okay.”

Bits and pieces of that night continued to flush out for the next hour. “Eighty degrees. They said her body temperature was eighty degrees.”

“They’re trying to warm her up. They’re doing everything they can, Marlene.”

I went along for the ride. There was no reason to make things worse. Like last time, I comforted her until the episode passed. There was no reason to break her heart all over again, to catch her up on all the bad things just so she could live through hell again . . . and likely not remember it the next day.

The sedative the nurse gave Marlene finally kicked in and she calmed down, eventually falling asleep.

“You got one of those injections for me?” I joked when Shannon came in to check on us.

“You have practice today?”

“I do.”

She smiled ruefully. “Then no. But if you’d like to speak to Dr. Pallen, she’s making rounds. I can page her to come in and talk to you.”

“Thanks, Shannon. But I’m good. How long will that thing knock her out for?”

“She’ll probably be out for most of the day.” She put her hand on my shoulder as I sat watching Marlene sleep. “Don’t worry, Brody. We’ll keep a good eye on her. We’ll call you if anything happens or if she wakes up upset again.”

“I’ll stop back after practice tonight.”

“I’ll make sure the night nurses know she can have a visitor after hours.”

“Thanks.”

To say I got my ass kicked during practice would be putting it too mildly. Between the physical toll of staying up all night and my head being a fucking mess from the shit that had gone down with Marlene, it was no surprise that I found myself tossed around like a sack of hay. At one point, the practice squad actually started to go easy on me. Which just pissed off Coach even more than my slacking.

After practice, my knee was blown up like a balloon from all the twisting it did every time I got my ass knocked down. The team physical therapist ordered me a fifteen-minute soak in the ice bathtub. As if the morning’s stroll down memory lane hadn’t fucked with me enough, a soak in freezing water was just what I needed to remind me all over again of Willow’s ice-cold body being pulled from the Hudson.